You’ve perhaps heard about some staff changes at IWF. Barbara Ledeen, one of IWF’s early co-founders who over the years has made significant contributions to IWF, and Amy Holmes, director of campus outreach, have decided to pursue new career opportunities. We appreciate all the fine work that they have done for the IWF, and we wish them well.


Let us reassure you that IWF will not be changing its mission or direction. We will continue to provide the public with our stellar speakers series, panels, publications, press conferences, studies, and award-winning website.


A new issue of The Women’s Quarterly is just around the corner. Edited by Charlotte Hays, it features a dozen distinguished commentators with some unorthodox, even irreverent, advice on how to watch the fall presidential debates. In the same issue, authors Christina Hoff Sommers, Andrew Sullivan, and John Colapinto take on PC academia in a frank and timely discussion of gender identity and nature versus nurture.


Speaking of boys and girls, our fall speaker series kicks off with a “back to school” panel on education in September. Building on our reputation as an organization that engages in “myth-busting,” IWF will host an important panel discussion, “The XY Files: Ending the Gender Wars by Recognizing Sex Differences. . .The Truth is out There” on September 15 at the National Press Club from 12:00 – 2:00 pm in the Holeman Lounge. Immediately following an American Association of University Women conference that purports to move “beyond the gender wars” in education – but whose participants all subscribe to the fashionable feminist notion of gender as a social construct – IWF will offer a fascinating alternative forum, one that convenes prominent scholars in the area of research on sex differences. Our panel includes: Christina Hoff Sommers, W.H. Brady Fellow, American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys; Lionel Tiger, Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of The Decline of Males; Doreen Kimura, Professor of Psychology at Simon Fraser University and author of Sex and Cognition; Patricia Hausman, behavioral scientist and IWF National Advisory Board member.


Also in the works are more of our popular book events, showcasing authors such as IWF Science Advisor Sally Satel and her provocative new book, PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine.


We’ll report on these and other important developments through our newsletter Ex Femina, edited by Publisher Grace Paine Terzian, and this award-winning website (receiving more than 185,000 hits per month and a staggering 30,000 visits of over 5 minutes), under Managing Editor Ivy McClure Stewart.


Starting next month, as a follow-up to our myth-shattering book, Women’s Figures, IWF will release a series of guides on “What Women Need to Know About Work and Money,” edited by IWF Economics Project Director Christine Stolba, Ph.D. Kimberly Schuld is assuming the all-important liaison and coalition function for IWF on Capitol Hill.


Perhaps most exciting, we are poised to launch new weapons in the campus culture wars. Check back in September when we will unveil SheThinks.org, a lively new internet magazine aimed at 18-25 year-old women and men. IWF has also commissioned a ground-breaking new study of the attitudes of college-age women toward sex and courtship, directed by David Blankenhorn and Maggie Gallagher with the Insitute for American Values. The first phase of research, in-depth interviews at selected schools, is already complete, and the final study will give us powerful ammunition in the battles ahead.